About Us
Who are the Ajaxians? We think of the entire community as Ajaxians, but the folks behind the ajaxian.com site are:
Dion Almaer
Dion Almaer is the director of Developer Relations at Palm where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and the are now focused on delivering a fantastic developer experience on the mobile Web.
Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.
He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you
follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.
Ben Galbraith
Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of Ajaxian.com, an experienced Chief Technical Officer and Enterprise Java Architect, and is presently co-leading a new group at Mozilla focusing on developer tools for the Web. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he’s been professionally coding in Java. In 2005, Ben delivered over a hundred technical presentations at venues including JavaOne, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums.
Michael Mahemoff
Michael Mahemoff is a hands-on software consultant with nine years commercial experience. Building on psychology and software engineering degrees, he completed a PhD on design patterns for usability. He’s the founder of AjaxPatterns.org, an Ajax design reference soon to be published as the “Ajax Design Patterns” book, and the creator of the corresponding Ajax Demos. Michael has run conference sessions on agile topics such as Extreme Usability and Self-Documenting Software. Java/J2EE has been the dominant programming platform in his career, though personal projects have used Ruby, PHP, and plain-old Bash. His blog and podcast covers a mix of Ajax, agile, programming, and the occasional usability rant.
Rey Bango
Rey is an industry veteran, with over 19 years of experience in information technology. He brings a unique perspective to RIA development having built true desktop applications for 8 years prior to moving into web programming and being keenly aware of the challenges involved in building desktop-like web applications. Rey is also member of the jQuery JavaScript library’s Core Project Team.
He’s developed a wealth of knowledge stemming from his work with such technologies as client/server, OOP, PowerBuilder, Sybase, ASP, ColdFusion, DHTML, & Ajax. His blog can be found at reybango.com.
Andrea Giammarchi
Andrea Giammarchi is a full stack web developer with nearly 10 years of hands-on experience working in the field. Starting as server side and database developer, but constantly updated thanks to his passion, Andrea has recieved his ActionScript 2.0 Developer certification in 2004, a year before the ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) one.
He has been always focused on Web standards, performances, best practices or innovative solutions, deciding at some point to abandon ActionScript in order to dedicate more time over JavaScript, Ajax, and “zero plug-ins” RIA.
Currently employee in London as Engineer for a 100% JavaScript/Ajax desktop like application, Andrea is often trying to contribute for different Web related projects, sometimes inspiring some new technique via his 100% ugly blog: WebReflection
Chris Cornutt
Chris Cornutt is mainly a PHP developer, and has been working with the language for over 6 years now. He also runs the PHP news/community site, PHPDeveloper.org. He has recieved his ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) and is very involved in the PHP community.
Chris has been published in serveral sources, including a selection from the Worx book “PHP String Handling” and several issues of PHP Magazine on a wide range of topics. He is also a part of the newly formed php|architect’s Pro::PHP podcast, developing and recording the podcasts’ bi-weekly newscasts.
Salil Deshpande
Salil Deshpande is a Silicon Valley veteran and insider. He advises Ajaxian and finds scoop on Ajax and Web 2.0 happenings in the valley and beyond. Salil is muddling through ideas as Partner at Bay Partners, a venture capital firm, where he also helps find and evaluate investments in Ajax, open source, and online communities. Prior to that he was CEO of several companies, including The Middleware Company, which operated sites such as TheServerSide.com and TheServerSide.NET.
Dietrich Kappe
Dietrich Kappe is a co-founder and the CTO of Pathfinder Associates, LLC, a hybrid User Experience Design and RIA development shop. Dietrich published one of the first 100 public web sites and launched one of the first Java Servlet-based web applications. He has been a software engineer for over 17 years, a frequent open source contributor, and has developed applications for the Media, Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare industries.
Dietrich is a technical speaker on Agile Software Development, AJAX and Business Rules technology. He publishes the Agile Ajax and Business Rules blogs and is a contributor to the RealRules Blogzine.
Rob Sanheim
Rob Sanheim is a software developer with over six years development experience and over ten years of IT experience. He is a Sun Certified Java Programmer with extensive experience in developing web applications. Rob has experience in a variety of Java open source frameworks, including Spring, Hibernate, and Struts.
His passions include test-driven development, agile methodologies, and playing around with Ruby to keep his skills up until he can get paid for it. Rob has also done a considerable amount of work with Ajax applications and is a co-editor for Ajaxian.com. He is currently employed with the Madison based consulting firm Smart Solutions. His blog on all things relating to software can be found at robsanheim.com.
Chris Heilmann
Chris Heilmann has been a web developer for over years, after being a newscaster, audio producer and radio journalist for two. He works for
Yahoo in the UK as trainer and web architect and oversees the code quality on the front end for Europe and Asia. Previously he worked for several agencies and dotcoms and created multinational and -lingual sites for clients like HP, McDonalds and VisitBritain.
He is very much dedicated to creating a usable, accessible and future-proof web and is agnostic to the technologies involved to build them – as long as they produce code that adheres to an understandable standard. He is a strong believer in a move from web development as a technical problem to seeing it as a matter of teamwork and different layers of technology and skillset working seamlessly together.
He’s published several books on the topics of accessibility, JavaScript and creating web products using APIs and hosted services.
He blogs at http://wait-till-i.com and is available on many a social
network as “codepo8.”.
Brad Neuberg
Brad Neuberg is a developer advocate at Google for the Open Web, focused on HTML 5, SVG, and more. He is the creator of a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks for expanding the capabilities of web applications, including Dojo Storage, Dojo Offline, and Really Simple History. Brad worked with Douglas Engelbart on the HyperScope project; explored deeply collaborative web browsers with Paper Airplane; worked on one of the first web-based RSS aggregators; and was a Developer Advocate for the Gears project. He is currently working on the SVG Web library, a drop-in JavaScript toolkit that brings SVG 1.1 support to Internet Explorer. Brad also created Coworking, an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed.
Brad blogs at Coding in Paradise and Twitters at bradneuberg.
